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Perhaps I'm totally ignorant as to what makes women feel welcome in online communities but from reading your post it sounds as though everyone who dislikes lewd sexual jokes from the resident bots and meatbags is unlikely to like #perl regardless of their gender.

Even if we were to operate on the assumption that sexual jokes aimed towards a given gender would make members of that gender feel uncomfortable the #perl flavor of sillyness is mostly derived from Jerkcity and thus at large devoid of any women w

First thing - #perl has a tradition of setting embarassing out-of-context quotes as channel topics. As quoted above it's been mangled: use.perl has stripped out the angle-bracket-wrapped nicks in the quote, and given it a nasty spin.

#perl is far and away from the kind of anti-female sexist atmosphere you get in some places, like this [escapistmagazine.com]. There's not a single person in the channel that would subscribe to that viewpoint.

jarich was unfortunate enough to have appeared in channel when nobody seems to have been talking, and ended up talking to purl. purl, as anyone who has used it knows, is a decade's worth of information dump. Some good, most pointless, some downright inaccurate, harmful, abusive, or all three. The "help" factoid was one of the latter (#perl's reputation as "where the assholes go to die" is well earned). But it's now been replaced with something better (thanks, Skud).

Basically, if you can get past the initial learning curve (which mainly consists of lurking until you notice that all the shouting isn't serious), you'll meet smart people. But it's a steep curve. That's how we play the game.

#perl has never made any representation of being friendly and welcoming to newcomers; it's a social club for a small group of people. That it resides on irc.perl.org is only a very recent development in its history. Discusson in-channel earlier today suggested a fair few people would prefer that the network stop being irc.perl.org and go back to being obscure. That way people wouldn't turn up, be shocked at all the assholes and run away again.

And yes, there's a fair amount of "DONGS" and "HLAGH": it's been a running joke for years. (BTW, it's mainly about men; the Jerkcity cast is largely male. And unashamedly queer. So it's not like a woman would enter the channel and immediately be greeted with "funny" requests to give head, or some other similar bullshit [xkcd.com].) The solution is a careful application of/ignore. Filter out some words and your #perl experience will be a much milder one, to be sure.